Tag: Jones

President-elect Barack Obama introduced his principal national security Cabinet selections to the world Monday and left no doubt that he intends to start his administration on a war footing. It is revealing that his choice for national security adviser is a director of Boeing, a weapons manufacturer, and Chevron, an oil giant.

Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones have been working independently to make Bill Clinton’s life miserable for years, and now the two scandal magnets have come together to put out a series of videos—for a fee, of course. The Guardian chronicles some of the numerous ways the two have profited from their alleged relationships with the former president.

Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting committee has been meeting with lawmakers in Washington, so naturally a few names have started to filter out. Most were to be expected (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Jim Webb and so on), but among them is someone you may not have heard of: retired Gen. James Jones, a veteran of the Vietnam War and former supreme allied commander of NATO. Of course it’s far too soon to place bets.

Over two years ago, Jamie Leigh Jones was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad’s Green Zone when she was gang-raped, allegedly by several co-workers. According to Jones, instead of attending to her injuries and bringing her assailants to justice, KBR officials held her for 24 hours in a shipping container without food or water and then told her she would lose her job if she left Iraq. Now, it’s unclear whether the case will go to trial, and her attackers may escape punishment due to a legal loophole regarding U.S. contractors working abroad.

A new independent report from a congressionally appointed panel of retired senior military officers criticizes Iraq’s “dysfunctional” Interior Ministry, noting rife sectarianism and corruption. The report also blames Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for problems with Iraq’s army, which it says will not be self-sufficient for at least two years.

A high-ranking active duty general has endorsed Bob Woodward’s characterization of criticisms the general made of the Bush administration, referring to the Iraq war as a “debacle” and saying: “The Joint Chiefs have been systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld.”